Cleaving: The Story of a Marriage

“Marriage is like a rain forest,” Vicki Covington writes in Cleaving. “The story of a marriage contains all that grows in the canopy, all that is visible from an aerial, or public, view. The understory of a marriage is the place where . . . we struggle, fight, and conceive. It’s the place where compost is made, where anything can grow, including forgiveness.” Told in the authors’ alternating voices, Cleaving is both the story and the understory of a marriage. Childhood acquaintances, Vicki and Dennis meet again in their twenties and wed. they “promise each other nothing” and get more than they’d bargained alcoholism, infidelity, infertility, uncertainty. tumult gives way to sobriety, parenthood, and meaningful work, but a yearning remains. In a quest to root themselves in the larger world, they embark on a mission to dig water wells in Central America, assuaging a spiritual thirst by addressing a practical need. Yet even this is part of the story-the visible, overarching canopy-of the marriage. The understory-and the triumph of this haunting book, which is neither sentimental nor cynical-is its portrayal of the eddying of passion through the institution that enshrines but cannot contain it. A soulful and unsparing portrait of the forces that threaten-and sustain-a relationship over time.